Hemant Mehta is the founder and editor of FriendlyAtheist.com, a YouTube creator, and podcast co-host. He is a former National Board Certified math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He has appeared on CNN and FOX News and served on the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief and the Secular Student Alliance. He has written multiple books, including I Sold My Soul on eBay and The Young Atheist's Survival Guide. He also edited the book Queer Disbelief.
Last month, Courtney Canfield, a former staffer at the office of the Kansas Secretary of State, said in a lawsuit that she was illegally fired by Assistant Secretary Eric K. Rucker (below) for not attending church enough. The problems began in February of 2013, when Canfield was invited to a church service by a staffer working for Rucker. That happened multiple times but she never went. (Canfield was a Methodist, but not particularly religious.) Read more
There’s a disturbing practice in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish culture known as metzitzah b’peh in which a rabbi (mohel) sucks the blood from a baby boy who has just been circumcised. If that wasn’t disgusting enough, some of the mohels have had herpes simplex, passing the virus on to the children. Since 2000, more than a dozen infants have contracted herpes in this manner and at least two have died. In some cases, parents weren’t even made aware the mohels were performing this ritual. Read more
There was a time when CJ Werleman was writing a number of books promoting atheism, with titles like God Hates You, Hate Him Back, Jesus Lied: He Was Only Human, and Atheists Can’t Be Republicans. Then, he began taking the Ann Coulter and Donald Trump approach to atheism, using hyperbolic rhetoric to get attention and lashing out against anyone who criticized him, discrediting himself as a rational voice along the way. He’s compared Sam Harris to Pat Robertson, called the New Atheists “white supremacists,” said that Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins echo “religious crusaders who wish to cleanse the earth of opposing religious beliefs,” and blamed Harris and Dawkins for the Chapel Hill shootings earlier this year. Things only got worse after he got caught committing plagiarism in a number of his articles. He later admitted screwing up, but not before falsely accusing Sam Harris of doing the same thing. (Harris debunked those accusations with ease.) Werleman has now released a book called The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists in which he calls New Atheism a “cult” that is “every bit as crude and racist as fascist, neo-Nazi, movements.” Read more
Raif Badawi is the Saudi Arabian blogger who is currently facing 1000 lashes, 10 years in jail, and a 1,000,000 Saudi riyal fine (about $266,000), all because be began a progressive website that called for, among other things, religious tolerance and women’s rights. He was charged with apostasy. On Friday, his wife Ensaf Haidar announced the formation of the Raif Badawi Foundation for Freedom, an organization promoting freedom of expression worldwide and supporting journalists in the Arab world: Read more
